I would like to create a Guest account on my box, that gets wiped each time the account is used by someone that just "needs to quickly check something". It used to be, in the days of LM10, that when I created the account I would just define their home in /tmp/home/guest.
Today running LM13, this is not possible. The login manager complains that the user's home does not exist.
Is this a feature or a bug?

Am I correct in that the (old) login manager handled this? How much problems am I going to run into if I replace my login manager. I would really like to not brick my machine.

There should be a "Users and Groups" in settings or admin (or Control Center) for creating accounts. But I don't know about it getting "wiped" as you're asking. "Users and Groups" will allow you to create an account, set password, limit permissions to for instance, establish wireless connections, etc. There's more you can do in here by adding / removing what groups that account is part of. (or you can do that from command line of course).

It creates the home/guest... folder structure. The "Login Window" settings is different now. I don't go back that far to LM 10, so I can't say about that part.

Right. And one thing that control (or from command line) allows you to do is to set the user's home location. In older LM versions I was able to set it to /tmp, which automatically gets wiped every time you reboot the machine, and whenever this guest account would log in, their home was recreated from the skeleton files. In LM13, this recreate no longer works (the /tmp still gets wiped). I'm just wondering if this is a feature or a bug.
Also, I'm wondering if I swap out MDN (I think that is current login manager) for the older one (which I do not know what it is called), how much stuff is that going to break. May be time to fire up my VM and start breaking things.

SiKing wrote:Right. And one thing that control (or from command line) allows you to do is to set the user's home location. In older LM versions I was able to set it to /tmp, which automatically gets wiped every time you reboot the machine, and whenever this guest account would log in, their home was recreated from the skeleton files. In LM13, this recreate no longer works (the /tmp still gets wiped). I'm just wondering if this is a feature or a bug.
Also, I'm wondering if I swap out MDN (I think that is current login manager) for the older one (which I do not know what it is called), how much stuff is that going to break. May be time to fire up my VM and start breaking things.

I get that now. Maybe this will help, but note that these screenshots are in LMDE. In Users and Groups, Advanced you can specify where that home folder is. If you put it in tmp you might get the results you're looking for since it's cleaned out on reboot. Since it's managed from Users and Groups I would think it'll recreate on "guest" login like you're looking for it to do. If this doesn't work your best bet might be to create the account via command line options as I don't know what swapping MDM would do.

Maybe someone will jump in with an opinion on that. (or even an answer, that would be better )

I suspect we have a misunderstanding.
Every single thing you said so far, I already knew. What I am trying to say is: the procedure you describe used to work, but does not anymore. However, in this case I am not sure if it is a bug or just a feature that I used to exploit.
Thank You.